Huddlehttp://www.businessinsider.com/category/huddle
en-usSun, 02 Aug 2015 20:29:41 -0400Sun, 02 Aug 2015 20:29:41 -0400The latest news on Huddle from Business Insiderhttp://static3.businessinsider.com/assets/images/bilogo-250x36-wide-rev.pngBusiness Insiderhttp://www.businessinsider.com
http://www.businessinsider.com/huddles-new-ceo-morten-brogger-2015-1Huddle's New CEO Says An IPO Won't Happen Soonhttp://www.businessinsider.com/huddles-new-ceo-morten-brogger-2015-1
Thu, 29 Jan 2015 09:51:00 -0500James Cook
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><img style="float:right;" src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/54ca48ebdd08955e438b45a1-800-600/morten-brgger-1.jpg" border="0" alt="Morten Brøgger">Huddle, the London-based company that makes collaboration software for documents, has hired new CEO Morten Brøgger to replace <span>Alastair Mitchell</span>. After the announcement,&nbsp;<span>Brøgger said that any plans for an IPO are being delayed,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.techworld.com/news/apps/new-huddle-ceo-puts-ipo-discussions-on-hold-3596100/">Sam Shead of Techworld reports</a>.</span></span></p>
<p>"We have mutually agreed we’re going to put all these discussions on hold," he said in an interview with the website.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Brøgger has plenty of experience in working at enterprise tech companies. He was previously the chief sale officer of Syniverse, an international online transactions company.</p>
<p>Huddle raised $51 million in its Series D round in December. It said at the time that it would use the funding to double the size of its product team.&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Huddle's former CEO, Alastair Mitchell, is going to become the company's CMO and President. </span><a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/interview-with-huddle-ceo-alastair-mitchell-2014-12">He told Business Insider in December</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">that an IPO was "probably a few years away." Now, the company's new CEO looks set to focus on international growth instead.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/huddle-is-raising-51-million-in-funding-2014-12">Huddle raised $51 million in its Series D round in December</a>. It said at the time that it would use the funding to double the size of its product team.</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/huddles-new-ceo-morten-brogger-2015-1#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/interview-with-huddle-ceo-alastair-mitchell-2014-12HUDDLE CEO: A 'Ton Of Customers' Are Leaving Box For Us Because There's Less Risk Of Being Hackedhttp://www.businessinsider.com/interview-with-huddle-ceo-alastair-mitchell-2014-12
Fri, 12 Dec 2014 04:32:31 -0500James Cook
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/548ab64fdd0895b2168b4626-1200-924/huddle-ceo-alastair-mitchell.jpg" alt="Huddle CEO Alastair Mitchell" border="0"></p><p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;"></span></p>
<p>After launching in 2006, UK tech company Huddle <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/huddle-is-raising-51-million-in-funding-2014-12">just raised&nbsp;$51 million</a>.</p>
<p>Huddle is a file sharing cloud service, like Dropbox or Box, but it focuses on enterprises like big companies rather than individual consumers. Huddle enables large&nbsp;agencies to share, save, and collaborate on documents online. More importantly, Huddle users can control who has access to which files, so it's more secure.</p>
<p>That extra layer of security is crucial in&nbsp;<a href="Here's%20Everything%20We%20Know%20About%20The%20Mysterious%20Group%20That%20Hacked%20Sony%20Pictures%20%20Read%20more:%20http://uk.businessinsider.com/author/james-cook#ixzz3Laok5jSO">lieu of the recent Sony hack</a> and Edward Snowden's trove of NSA documents.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Huddle isn't really competing against Dropbox and Box, although it does gain business from them. Instead, its main competitor is legacy enterprise software such as Microsoft SharePoint, which companies have often been using for years.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The company's client list is impressive. It works with Apple-owned headphones manufacturer Beats by Dre, international accounting firm KPMG, a host of US government agencies including the office of the Secretary of Defence, and around 80% of the UK's central government agencies.</p>
<p><a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/huddle-is-raising-51-million-in-funding-2014-12">The company announced on Thursday that it had completed its series D </a>fundraising<a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/huddle-is-raising-51-million-in-funding-2014-12"> round</a>, bringing in $51 million in new investment. That's a giant sum for a UK tech company.</p>
<p>Business Insider met with Alastair Mitchell, Huddle's cofounder and CEO, in the company's London office to talk about its rapid growth, and the challenges of building software secure enough to be used on classified government data.</p>
<p><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;">Business Insider: Why is Huddle's office in a different part of London as opposed to the famed "Silicon Roundabout" tech cluster near Old Street.</strong></p>
<p><span><strong>Alastair Mitchell:</strong>&nbsp;</span>We [used to be] right on the roundabout there, so we were literally, as you came out of the Tube, you’d see big Huddle offices with big windows and our names across them. But what’s great about that area is that it’s full of small, low-cost offices. But they’re small, right? So when you get to our size and you’re growing up and you need hundreds of people in an office, there just isn’t space enough. They’re all small offices, so you have to move down to towards the City, which is hilarious. 25% of all the new space in the City taken last year was actually tech firms, which is amazing.</p>
<p><strong>BI: You were one of the very first tech companies to become part of the city's startup scene. What was that like?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> When we started, seven years ago, there was really very little. The tech scene was very disparate, there was a bit going up in Cambridge, traditionally the kind of 1.0 stuff: Chips, hardware, and so on. But there was very little going on in London. There was a lot of media, as you know, a tonne of media, some fintech, but there was no real industry. And so we were one of the first to start going, and then there was a small group of us and the first generation of guys and a bunch of really great companies there who are starting to do really well on a global stage, which is great.</p>
<p>We got together, we spent a lot of time together, and gradually together we helped to build a bit of a scene, and then it has really accelerated from there. We’re very proud to be at the start of it, but we know it’s not because of us, it’s just everyone helped. There were many people trying to do the same thing. What’s great now is it’s proper, it’s real, it’s big.</p>
<p><strong>BI: Does being a British company work against you when you go to win business in the US?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> There is no favouritism, there is no discretion against US or UK companies, the world is a much better place than that. But there are local favourites that are growing up with lots of VCs in their network investing in them. So you have to bust through that, and we’re doing that just like Box are trying to bust through that over in Europe with us.</p>
<p><strong>BI: How do you differentiate yourself from companies like Box and Dropbox who are creating similar storage tools for companies?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> The first thing is that we do something different. Huddle is all about collaboration, and it’s all about security, and it’s all about large organisations and enterprises. The first thing is communicating that, and what’s nice about that is that this whole content collaboration space, sync and share, storage is huge, and it’s exploding. It’s a massive great market, and what’s happening is that it’s starting to mature, so you’ve got all the consumer guys who are getting great scale, but now being commoditised to hell: Amazon, Google, Microsoft.</p>
<p><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;">BI: You mention security as one of your selling points there. How secure is Huddle?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> Control is actually what we care about as a consumer. So in iCloud I want to know...the thing that frustrates me about iCloud, and I’ve had it, is you take a photo, you delete it on one device, and you think it’s then deleted on all devices. It isn’t, you look at your iPad and it’s still sitting there as one of the things to be deleted. I’m like ‘I got rid of that photo!’</p>
<p>So it’s control that people want, so that is the same in enterprise. That doesn’t just mean IT, big bad IT, it actually means me as a corporate lawyer or as someone working on Apple’s supply chain. They care very much about not just security, which is becoming ubiquitous, but really who exactly can see my information as I transmit it.</p>
<p>Beats by Dre are a huge customer of Huddle and they have very similar issues around supply chain, new products coming out, they work with huge manufacturing centres in China, and they’re working on these for a year before they get released, and no-one must know about the new products.</p>
<p>So how do they ensure that the information that they’re sharing doesn’t get leaked? And that’s much more than just the security in the system, it’s about who has access to it, being able to say exactly the audit trail and the version control, knowing that if you look at a design on your mobile device, I know exactly that you did do that. And if you lose that mobile device, knowing immediately that it should be wiped from the device and no-one can see it. And if you leave the company that I’m working with, knowing immediately that you no longer have access. Literally the minute you walk out the door. Even knowing, and this is how extreme we get, which way your developers face. Do they face to the window or not? We work with a lot of government data, and guess what, who’s looking in through the window?</p>
<p>This is the lengths of extremes that big enterprise companies that really care about collaboration and security go to. And that’s why enterprises who are working with governments, but also work with people’s personal and corporate tax data, the most sensitive information, rely on Huddle. That’s real security, and that’s boring, right? It’s why, when you walk in the door, even though as a startup, a small, nimble, agile company, the security levels you’re going through to get into this office are pretty high.</p>
<p><strong>BI: So if I'm an unhappy Beats by Dre supply chain worker in China and I want to steal some documents and leave, would I be able to do that if the company is using Huddle?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> No, that’s the point. Huddle will stop you doing that. And if you did manage to get anything, we would know what you’ve got.</p>
<p><strong>BI: That kind of control must be attractive to governments as well?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> It’s very attractive to governments, it’s very attractive to large corporates, it’s very attractive to anyone who cares about their information.</p>
<p>So here’s the interesting paradox about security: Everyone is now more comfortable with the general security of systems. Do you remember back in the day when you first started using e-commerce? You would go in through some crazy banking system and then get redirected back. Then there was the ‘secured by’ the different finance organisations. Now you just have a little padlock, and no-one even bothers looking, you just assume that the payment site you’re going on is secure.</p>
<p>So the same thing is happening with security, everyone’s getting more comfortable with putting their stuff in the cloud, but, at the same time, everyone is getting much more paranoid about the control of that information once it gets into the cloud.</p>
<p><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;">BI: If I'm a company in France and someone in the US views one of my documents, will I get an alert?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> Yes, you can do that, absolutely. Well you can control if you decide not, you can control that they can’t. So you can lock down access by IP, domain, by geographic location, by the data centre they’ve been invited into.</p>
<p>The idea of a huddle is that if you’re in the huddle, you can work with me, you can share my information. If you’re not in a huddle, you can’t. Now that’s huge because 99% of all the other systems out there, including our great competitors Box and people like that, are open systems. So in other words, if I create a folder, anyone can access my folder and get to it via a link unless I shut it down. It’s the reverse, it’s open by default, closed by permission. Huddle is closed by default, open by permission. If you Google enough, you can find Box and Dropbox links available on the web of amazing amounts of information from corporates because they haven’t locked it down, it’s insane. It’s terrifying.</p>
<p><strong>BI: Do you do that when you go into companies and pitch?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> Yeah, and often we don’t have to because companies have done that themselves. Often the journey goes ‘we bought Dropbox because it’s great, and Dropbox is great, it’s a great system. Lots of people are using but we’re scared of security, just general vague security. So we bought Box because it’s supposed to be a slightly more secure version of Dropbox.' And Box is great as well, they’re amazing guys, love ‘em. But then they Google, and they look out on the web, and actually all these links are available out there in Box. And they’re like ‘Holy crap,’ you know. And it’s just a storage tool, so now we want to go to next level and they buy Huddle. So that’s a really common journey, and we pick up a tonne of customers on that journey.</p>
<p><strong>BI: How do you change the software for use in government?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> Well the answer is that you don’t. That’s the reason why we’re so popular in government, it’s about 30% of our business so we’re not dominant, but it’s a big chunk of our business.</p>
<p>I was just at an event for the UK government with Francis Maude, who’s the cabinet minister, and Liam Maxwell who is the CTO for the UK government, and Vivek Kundra who is the ex CTO of the US government. So the great and the good. And we were one of only three people who they asked to present to the whole of this group. But the reason we’re there is because we’re not doing anything different for government. We are providing a system that is secure and useful enough for governments to use. Number two is it solves a real problem because government is very collaborative. It turns out they’re the most collaborative organisation you can find because they create policy. But thirdly, they don’t want bad software, no-one wants bad software and it just because you work in government doesn’t mean you want it. So what you do is you provide a great bit of software that works great, that is just as good as anything you’ve used at home, but that is available to a government user, solves a problem for them and, importantly, it’s secure enough for them. And that’s actually the difference.</p>
<p>Really, what we do is we spend our time getting all the security and accreditation so that they can use it. But it’s the same software. And that’s really important. The great thing is that by doing all this work on security and accreditation for government, everyone else benefits. So that’s why KPMG come and use us. They think ‘Well, hang on, if you’ve gone through all this work, that’s the best of the best, so we get that benefit as well.’ But that’s the great thing about the cloud: Once you’ve done it for one client, you’ve done it for everyone.</p>
<p><strong>BI: Would a military ever use Huddle?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> Again, it depends on what you’re trying to share. So, no, we don’t have [them]. They tend to work at levels of security that are way higher and work on very small, very discreet networks, to the point where you literally have to be in a room in a building in Langley. It’s that level of encryption. So no, we don’t work with that, but we do have the office of the Secretary of Defence working with Huddle, but it’s not for military purposes. It’s relatively, for the government, unclassified information, and it’s all about families and people working together and so on.</p>
<p><strong>BI: So the US government has around six different levels of classified information, and that sounds like, I believe, levels one to two. Which levels of classification does Huddle work with?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> We’re up to about the middle of that, about three. We can offer for it for zero to three.</p>
<p><strong>BI: So Amazon does levels three to four?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> They have their own data centre that is designed for the Department of Defence that is three to four. No-one really does it at scale above that. Most of the information that governments work on are nought to three. Some cases up to four.</p>
<p><strong>BI: How is working with the US government different to working with the UK government?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> It’s very similar, except, and here’s where I would big up my home country, the UK government is doing some amazing things, actually.</p>
<p>The US government lead the way. Vivek Kundra, who worked for Obama, came in and said there should be a cloud-first policy in US government. We run thousands of data centres, we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year in one department on things like Sharepoint legacy technology, that should stop. We should move to the cloud. They lead the way, which is amazing, but the UK government has really accelerated it and what they’re doing, which is very interesting, is creating platforms, they created a whole G-Cloud procurement framework so small businesses can sell to government more easily, they’re on a real push to really be much more agile, develop their own services, break up huge SI contracts. They’re actually very similar, they’re trying to solve the same problems, cost is important, value, delivering real news technologies, but the UK government is actually one of the most leading, if not the most leading government globally at this stuff. It’s phenomenal.</p>
<p>Believe it or not, the other one that’s amazing globally is Estonia. And if you ranked them it would be Estonia and the UK first, then you’ve got people like South Korea, New Zealand is very very advanced, then the US and a whole bunch of others.</p>
<p><strong>BI: The Estonian government is easier to work with than the US government?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> They are revolutionary, the way the Estonian government works. It’s a small country, about a hundred million people, so it’s easier. For instance, they’re launching a completely open ID system which allows you as an Estonian citizen to access all your systems online, which now the UK government is doing. It’s brilliant, really really revolutionary. The US government lead the way, though. They just have huge scale, so we’re delighted to work with them, and we work with four of the biggest agencies now in the US government.</p>
<p><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;">BI: So how long will it be until a Huddle IPO?</strong></p>
<p><strong>AM:</strong> We’re probably a few years away from it still. But who knows, we’re growing really fast. It's an extraordinarily rapid rate at the moment, which is very exciting. There's lots of of news to announce in a while. Lots of things to do. Honestly, we’re just focusing on building a big business fast. Really fast.</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/interview-with-huddle-ceo-alastair-mitchell-2014-12#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/huddle-is-raising-51-million-in-funding-2014-12London's Hottest Enterprise Startup Raised $51 Million In New Fundinghttp://www.businessinsider.com/huddle-is-raising-51-million-in-funding-2014-12
Thu, 11 Dec 2014 07:30:00 -0500James Cook
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/54898e91dd08953b0e8b45a1-1200-924/alastair-mitchell-and-andy-mcloughlin-of-huddle.jpg" border="0" alt="Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin of Huddle"></p><p>The London-based document collaboration startup Huddle is announcing a monster round of funding, bringing in $51 million.</p>
<p>Huddle is an enterprise software product used by governments and big businesses to coordinate work on documents.</p>
<p>The valuation of the company is undisclosed. However, similar companies have previously seen valuations at about seven times the price of the latest investment round, implying that Huddle might be worth $350 million. For a UK company, a $50 million-plus funding round is a massive sum.</p>
<p>Companies like Beats by Dre use Huddle to share sensitive design documents with their suppliers. Groups of employees can work on files, and the software controls who can access which files while keeping logs of edits.</p>
<p>The new funding is Huddle's series D round. It previously raised about $40 million from venture capital funds and angel investors. The new investment was led by Zouk Capital with participation from the Hermes GPE Environmental Innovation Fund.</p>
<p>Huddle says it will use the funding to expand across Europe and the US, as well as to double the size of its product team. </p>
<p>The company has an impressive list of customers. Eighty percent of central government departments in the UK use Huddle, while US government agencies like NASA and the office of the Secretary of Defense are also using the software. It's not just governments that use the software, though. Huddle says that 80% of Fortune 500 companies are customers.</p>
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<h3><strong><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/t-boone-pickens-billionaire-strict-morning-routine-workout-2014-10"></a></strong></h3><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/huddle-is-raising-51-million-in-funding-2014-12#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/huddles-ceo-fun-with-fire-and-water-2013-10Huddle's CEO Spends His Free Time Setting Expensive Cars On Firehttp://www.businessinsider.com/huddles-ceo-fun-with-fire-and-water-2013-10
Sun, 20 Oct 2013 09:30:00 -0400Julie Bort
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/4fe895c8ecad04d269000002-400-300/alastairmitchell-huddle.jpg" border="0" alt="Alastair Mitchell Huddle" /></p><p>If you're ever invited to hang with Huddle cofounder and CEO&nbsp;<span class="st">Alastair Mitchell</span> bring protective clothing, like a life vest, and maybe a fire extinguisher.</p>
<p>That's because when he's not <a href="http://www.huddle.com/">running Huddle</a>, a company that makes collaboration software that competes with Yammer, he's doing something daredevil (he'd call it "stupid"). Or he's building a car. Or a boat. And things don't always go as planned.</p>
<p>"To build something big you've got to start by knocking something down. That's been the guiding principal that I've had since I was a kid," he told Business Insider.</p>
<p>Thinking big came from his grandfather who in the mid-20th century built the biggest thing floating in the ocean, called the Ninian Central Platform, he says. It's an oil rig, the size of the Empire State Building, under water.</p>
<p>The thing was so massive that his grandfather had to buy a bay in Scotland to build it. He drained the bay, built the rig (on its side), refilled the bay with water and floated the rig out to the North Sea "where it lives to this day," Mitchell says.</p>
<p>His grandfather inspired Mitchell to become an engineer. But sometimes he goes a little <a href="http://www.topgear.com/uk/">"Top Gear"</a> with his own projects. (We're referring to the British TV show about men and their sports cars.)</p>
<p>"I believe you need to make a difference with your work life and you need to experience everything you can outside of your work life. Occasionally that means doing some pretty stupid things," he says.</p>
<p>For instance, he took a lightweight Lotus car chassis and put an engine in it that was "dramatically bigger," he says. "Then you drive it and in my case, you blow it up. I've blown it up twice actually."</p>
<p>Yes, he literally set the rear end of it on fire.</p>
<p>He sent us this picture of him driving the car a few minutes before it blew up.</p>
<p><img src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5261c17669beddaf441399cf-1200-924/huddle-alistair-mitchell-car.jpg" border="0" alt="Huddle Alistair Mitchell car" width="620" /></p>
<p>He collects other cars, too including a Caterham 7 kit car (that he built), a BMW M5 ("the biggest, fastest 4-seater, a crazy machine"), a Golf VW GTI and a Jeep Wrangler ("with huge wheels'), he says.</p>
<p>When not into fire, he's into flood.</p>
<p>He likes to sail his 18-foot skiff, the fastest kind of single boat, as fast as he can. Skiffs are flat-bottomed boats, meaning there's no big keel on their bottoms to counter-balance them. The faster you go, the more the boat will lean over and "I'll definitely capsize," he laughs. "If you want to go fast, you've got to blow something up."</p>
<p>He sent us this picture of him sailing on his boat being uncharacteristically mellow about it.</p>
<p><img src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/5261c687eab8ea2d5e9ec8d3-720-542/huddle%20alistair%20mitchell-sailing.jpg" border="0" alt="Huddle Alistair Mitchell sailing" width="620" /></p>
<p>That "blow things up" attitude permeates Huddle, he says, and it seems to be working for him.</p>
<p>Without a freemium model (everybody pays) the company has grown to 200 employees, four locations (New York, London, Washington D.C., San Francisco) and is used by 120,000 workgroups and millions of people, Mitchell tells us.</p>
<p>Huddle is on track to double revenues and its number of customers this year, too, he says. It's raised $38 million of venture funding in three rounds.</p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-hottest-cloud-startups-2013-10" >The 21 Hottest Cloud Startups Right Now</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/huddles-ceo-fun-with-fire-and-water-2013-10#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/huddle-rendering-update-2012-7Buying Yammer For $1.2 Billion Still Won't Protect Microsoft From This Disruptive Startup (MSFT)http://www.businessinsider.com/huddle-rendering-update-2012-7
Sat, 21 Jul 2012 09:00:00 -0400Matt Lynley
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/4edfd66369bedd241800000d/andy-mcloughlin.jpg" border="0" alt="andy mcloughlin" /></p><p>While <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/microsoft">Microsoft</a> is off spending $1.2 billion to bake social features into its enterprise services, file-sharing service <a href="http://www.huddle.com/">Huddle</a> &mdash; which already does that &mdash; is growing its enterprise revenue by 800 percent year-over-year.</p>
<p>And now Huddle is aiming to jump even further ahead of Microsoft and other file-sharing services with a new update released this week that will make collaborating online even more smoothly.</p>
<p>The new update includes a revamped way for rendering documents and files that can be viewed on any device &mdash; whether it's your phone, tablet, another computer or anything else.</p>
<p>That's important for employees that don't always have access to the original file, but still need to work with their other employees to get things just right. That could be perfecting a presentation or making sure everyone is briefed ahead of a meeting.</p>
<p>We caught up with co-founder Andy McLoughlin to find out why Huddle considered this update so significant. Here's what we learned:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Huddle was working on these features even before Microsoft announced it would buy <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/yammer">Yammer</a> for $1.2 billion</strong>. Still, the huge purchase was a big signal that major software companies are now realizing how important social is.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>The biggest new feature is rendering</strong>. When you upload a document to <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/google">Google</a> Docs and other services, it often isn't displayed like it looks in its original form. Huddle spent extra time making sure that it works smoothly.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>Huddle is seeing huge growth in its revenue</strong>. Enterprise revenues were up 800 percent, as was mentioned earlier.</li>
</ul>
<p>Here's a lightly-edited transcript of the interview:</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>BUSINESS INSIDER: What prompted you guys to roll out this new update? Did it have anything to do with Microsoft buying Yammer?</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong>AM</strong>: We don't believe in doing one update every year. We have a rolling program of updates, but this one is a good one. It's timely with what's going on in the market, with SharePoint buying Yammer. That was a confession from the software giant Microsoft that the way people work is changing. SharePoint and Office 365 by themselves are about creating content, but people don't want to email files any more. They want to have that conversation in the app. Collaboration is inherently very social, you're sharing and commenting on things. What we've been releasing, we've made that even stronger in the new app. We've really stacked it consumer social features, we've also spent a lot of time working on how users interact with content.</p>
<p><img class="float_left" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/5009d8516bb3f7511f000000/huddle-update.png" border="0" alt="huddle update" width="400" /></p>
<p class="p1"><strong>BI: So what's new, then?</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong>AM</strong>: The main thing is a really high-quality previewing and rendering of files in the browser.&nbsp;One of the big problems was online viewing of files. The quality was always kind of crappy, you can render document in Google Docs, but it looks terrible &mdash; it never looks like the original. We spent a huge amount of time building a rendering engine that's almost perfect. On the go, on my laptop or away from the office, I&nbsp;can be viewing the contents of Huddle without needing the latest version of Office. It looks exactly how you'd expect it to look.</p>
<p class="p1">With the new social features, I can kick off a conversation that feels very natural. Software companies like Microsoft have realized social is a very important feature. Our view is social is a feature, not a product, and we're looking to make sure people can track within Huddle the same way they track within consumer social tools. I think the final thing is that all of this is being held inside our system as well, documents aren't being passed through an external service to render, everything is happening on our service. When you deal with the government that's a really important thing. It's great for small businesses, for security.</p>
<p class="p2"><strong>BI: We're guessing that's a good thing. Was this in response to Yammer?</strong></p>
<p class="p2"><span><strong>AM</strong>: All this gives you the ability to have a conversation around your files and really all this being underpinned by the intelligence the guys cooked up a couple months ago, making sure the right info is being pushed to the right people at the right time.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span></span>This has been ongoing since before the Yammer acquisition was announced. That signaled that all these companies are on the same track. Social is important but the real value comes in for businesses when social is being used to leverage content that's already there. Social is helping real work get done, Microsoft realized that, it's gonna take them a long time to bake that into their existing products. I think it's a really smart move but I wouldn't expect to see this kind of functionality in share point any time soon.</p>
<p class="p2"><strong>BI: How's the business doing?</strong></p>
<p class="p2"><strong>AM</strong>: It's growing great. we're seeing 800 percent growth in our enterprise revenues this year. That is a real indication of not only how big this market is, but how quick it's moving, and also where Huddle is and the types of companies that we're serving.</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/huddle-rendering-update-2012-7#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/this-startup-parked-a-huge-ad-outside-of-yammers-london-office-trying-to-poach-employees-that-dont-want-to-work-for-microsoft-2012-7This Startup Parked A Huge Ad Outside Of Yammer's London Office Trying To Poach Employees That Don't Want To Work For Microsoft (MSFT)http://www.businessinsider.com/this-startup-parked-a-huge-ad-outside-of-yammers-london-office-trying-to-poach-employees-that-dont-want-to-work-for-microsoft-2012-7
Thu, 19 Jul 2012 12:25:00 -0400Matt Lynley
<p>We just received fun image sent from a tipster outside the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/yammer" class="hidden_link">Yammer</a> offices in London.</p>
<p>Apparently Huddle, a competitor to Microsoft's SharePoint software, is offering jobs to Yammer employees that don't want to join <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/microsoft" class="hidden_link">Microsoft</a>.</p>
<p>Microsoft bought Yammer, an enterprise social network, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/live-microsoft-yammer-conference-call-2012-6">for $1.2 billion just last month</a>. But not everyone who works at Yammer &mdash; a startup &mdash; might want to join the tech giant.</p>
<p><img src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5008334feab8eafc1e00002b-620-/outside-yammer-london.jpg" border="0" alt="outside yammer london" width="620" /></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-startup-parked-a-huge-ad-outside-of-yammers-london-office-trying-to-poach-employees-that-dont-want-to-work-for-microsoft-2012-7#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/huddle-ceo-microsoft-will-destroy-yammer-2012-6Huddle CEO: 'It's Pretty Obvious' Microsoft 'Will Destroy Yammer' (MSFT)http://www.businessinsider.com/huddle-ceo-microsoft-will-destroy-yammer-2012-6
Tue, 26 Jun 2012 16:10:18 -0400Julie Bort
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/4fe895c8ecad04d269000002/alastair-mitchell-huddle.jpg" border="0" alt="Alastair Mitchell Huddle" /></p><p>Alastair Mitchell, Huddle's CEO and co-founder is happy <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/microsoft">Microsoft</a> just bought <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/yammer">Yammer</a> for $1.2 billion.</p>
<p>Of the many file sharing cloud services out there, Huddle most closely competes with Microsoft SharePoint.</p>
<p>Huddle already has a social component, too, which is what Yammer will bring to SharePoint. Plus Huddle has a unique recommendation engine that helps it "filter out the noise," Mitchell told us.</p>
<p>Unlike SharePoint, it's already available on every mobile platform, including a new <a href="http://www.huddle.com/about/news/press-releases/huddle-unveils-new-ipad-app/">native iPad app just released today. </a></p>
<p>Mitchell is confident that the whole SharePoint/Yammer thing will be a disaster.&nbsp;</p>
<p>"I'm delighted for the Yammer guys. It's a huge exit for them. A bonkers revenue multiple. It validates the market. It's what CIOs are telling us every day. I don't want social on its own. I don't want a traditional management content system on its own," he says.</p>
<p>"Why it's also great is that they'll destroy Yammer. It's pretty obvious. They do that with every single business they build. It will come bundled for free with SharePoint and with everything else. You just look at the feature bloat in those products. No one uses [all those features] anyway. I'm personally happy that it knocks out someone in the market," he says.</p>
<p>Huddle still has Box and Jive to contend with, but Mitchell is eager to take on all comers. "Enterprises looked at Box and say it's not enterprise enough. They looked at Yammer say it's all social, not content. They look at Jive and say it's not cloud," he dishes.</p>
<p>Last month, Huddle <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/red-hot-startup-huddle-just-raised-24-million-2012-5">raised $24 million led by Jafco Ventures</a>, bringing its total raised to $40 million Huddle began in Europe, although it now has multiple U.S. offices. Mitchell is using the money to ramp up U.S. sales.</p>
<p>About 40% of its 100,000 companies using Huddle are in the U.S. "We service them from a tiny team with less than five reps in U.K. Can you imagine the damage we'll do when we land a huge team in the U.S. which is what we're doing now?" he says.</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/huddle-ceo-microsoft-will-destroy-yammer-2012-6#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/red-hot-startup-huddle-just-raised-24-million-2012-5Red-Hot Startup Huddle Just Raised $24 Millionhttp://www.businessinsider.com/red-hot-startup-huddle-just-raised-24-million-2012-5
Thu, 24 May 2012 13:02:00 -0400Matt Lynley
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/4fbe668eecad04d83c000004/alastair-mitchell-huddle.jpg" border="0" alt="alastair mitchell huddle" /></p><p>Enterprise file-sharing service <a href="http://www.huddle.com/">Huddle</a> has just raised a whopping $24 million led by <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/jafco-ventures" class="hidden_link">Jafco Ventures</a>.</p>
<p><span>Huddle co-founder Alastair Mitchell said he plans to use the funds to keep up with "phenomenal" demand. </span></p>
<p><span>But Huddle was already profitable last year and brings in around $25 million annually. Why would it raise funds?</span></p>
<p>We caught up with Mitchell to find out why. Here's what we found out:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Huddle is raising the money to go back into heavy growth mode</strong>. The company already had cash, but raising funds will help it grow more quickly. Huddle has tripled in size every year.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>Huddle's enterprise sector is five times larger this year than it was last year</strong>. It's on track to be eight times larger by the end of the year, Mitchell said.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>Huddle has had several acquisition offers, but it's turned them all down</strong>. Mitchell said he is intent on building a big software business and it's on track for an IPO.</li>
</ul>
<div><span style="line-height: 19px;">Here's a lightly edited transcription of the interview:</span></div>
<p class="p1"><strong>BUSINESS INSIDER: Why did you guys decide to raise this huge round of funding?</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong>ALASTAIR MITCHELL</strong>: It's basically to keep up with demand. We don't need to have the money to keep up cash flow. We've tripled in size every year since we've grown, but the demand we've seen is phenomenal. We've growth 5x in the enterprise sector last year. Users who are buying Huddle in their teams and departments, they are loving it.</p>
<p class="p1">In the last 6 months to a year there's been a huge pull from the top saying actually, we don't want to deploy this to small teams and across the organization. We want to displace the existing legacy software we have.To give you an example, we just planned to renew with one of our biggest customers, they grew from 100 users to 3,000 in 8 months. They ripped out and replaced their SharePoint instance. These are big deals led by the CIO, saying we want Huddle to deliver content collaboration that's to our users, that has the scale and security and support for our needs.</p>
<p class="p1"><strong><img class="float_left" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/4fbe691e6bb3f77f3f000002/huddle-pq.jpg" border="0" alt="huddle pq" />BI: Any chance you guys have been speaking with other companies about a potential acquisition?</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong>AM</strong>: We've had several offers in the last year alone, we've turned them all down because we're building a big software business. We might be taken up, but our current path is that we're on the path toward an IPO. We have faster growth rates than most of our competition. We're an international business, we're co-headquartered in London and San Francisco. We're seeing international growth and also in the U.S. We see ourselves as a big business IPOing in the next few years.</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>BI: What are you guys planning on using the funding for?</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong>AM</strong>: We've traditionally needed to spend less because Huddle grows so virally. That's still the case, we want to spend more on marketing, but this is also keeping up with demand. We're hiring a bunch of developers and there are a lot of new features we want to deliver for the enterprise. We're seeing so much demand from our large customers for new services. We have more leads than we know what to do with, that's why we're opening new offices.</p>
<p class="p1">We'll be 200 employees by the end of the calendar year, that's decent growth. The year after that we'll probably double again. We're adding a lot of heads in a lot of different places. We'll have an office in Washington D.C. this year as well, because the government is a big part of our customer base.</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>BI: What are some of the sectors where you are seeing the most growth?</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong>AM</strong>: The large customers grew 5x last year and are on track to be 8x this year. In terms of sectors, collaboration is a completely horizontal activity, but there are some sectors picking up faster. Anywhere where you have a group of people, collaborative-rich organizations, you see more pick up. Anything from marketing and sales, to human resources, professional services, government, those are all about collaboration and content. Financial Services is starting to spin up, investment bankers are the hardcore guys &mdash; they're usually the last part of the game. They're very much in on-prem mode, but they're starting to come about.</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/red-hot-startup-huddle-just-raised-24-million-2012-5#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/huddle-sync-software-2012-2Red-Hot Startup Huddle Is About To Make Your Work A Hundred Times Less Annoyinghttp://www.businessinsider.com/huddle-sync-software-2012-2
Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:35:00 -0500Matt Lynley
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/4edfd66369bedd241800000d/andy-mcloughlin.jpg" border="0" alt="andy mcloughlin" /></p><p><a href="http://www.huddle.com/campaign/huddle-general/?source=Google&amp;L1=Search-Brand-US-UK&amp;L2=Brand-Huddle&amp;l3=enterprise&amp;_kk=huddle&amp;_kt=d637188b-7e08-427d-b99f-fc4183e41543&amp;gclid=CMiVmpbAr64CFUbc4AodgkZ4Pg">Huddle</a> is offering new "Sync" software that's going to save you from a ton of headaches at work when you are trying to share files and work on projects remotely.</p>
<p>Huddle is a service for sharing files across a company &mdash; so you can work on a document or presentation in one state and your co-worker can access it in another state.</p>
<p>But file sharing is still a bit of a nightmare. It's hard to keep track of who made changes and which files you need to access.</p>
<p>Using what the company calls "patent-pending predictive technology," Huddle's Sync software automatically delivers the newest version of files that are relevant to you to your phone and other devices. (It wouldn't get into too many specifics, so we'll just assume it's magic for now.)</p>
<p>Sync also gives executives total control over the security of their company's most sensitive data. If, like <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/apple" class="hidden_link">Apple</a>, you manage to lose a phone or other piece of equipment, your boss can remotely wipe all that sensitive data off it as soon as it turns on.</p>
<p>Huddle was founded in 2006 by led by 32-year-old Andy McLoughlin and Alastair Mitchell.&nbsp;It's raised $14.2 million from&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/matrix-partners" class="hidden_link">Matrix Partners</a>&nbsp;and Eden Ventures.&nbsp;<span>It's one of a number of red-hot "Enterprise 2.0" startups that are bringing lessons learned from social media sites like&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/facebook" class="hidden_link">Facebook</a><span>&nbsp;to the workplace.</span></p>
<p>Huddle is already profitable and <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-red-hot-enterprise-startup-brings-in-around-25-million-yearly-and-is-profitable-2012-1">brings in slightly less than $25 million annually</a>. You can check out a full video explaining the service below:</p>
<p><object width="630" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Bzr4tBTubOg?version=3&amp;hl=en_US" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Bzr4tBTubOg?version=3&amp;hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="350" width="630" /></object></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/huddle-sync-software-2012-2#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/this-red-hot-enterprise-startup-brings-in-around-25-million-yearly-and-is-profitable-2012-1This 32-Year-Old Entrepreneur Built A Red-Hot Startup That's Bringing In $25 Million Yearly And Is Already Profitablehttp://www.businessinsider.com/this-red-hot-enterprise-startup-brings-in-around-25-million-yearly-and-is-profitable-2012-1
Mon, 09 Jan 2012 08:35:00 -0500Matt Lynley
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/4edfd66369bedd241800000d/andy-mcloughlin.jpg" border="0" alt="andy mcloughlin" /></p><p>Huddle, an enterprise file-sharing service, is already profitable and brings in slightly less than $25 million annually, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/business-insider" class="hidden_link">Business Insider</a> has learned.</p>
<p>A source very close to the company told Business Insider it had already become profitable heading into 2012. It's one of a number of red-hot "Enterprise 2.0" startups that are bringing lessons learned from social media sites like <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/facebook" class="hidden_link">Facebook</a> to the workplace.</p>
<p>Jive, an enterprise social network, filed to go public earlier this year and is valued at $573 million, while&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/boxnet" class="hidden_link">Box.net</a>&nbsp;turned down a $500 million buyout offer earlier this year.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Competitor Box.net, which we also&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/boxnet-operates-at-15-million-loss-each-month-2011-11">reported is making between $25 million and $40 million but burning $18 million annually</a>, makes roughly the same amount in revenue, the source told us. The growth within Huddle is literally in the hundreds of percent, the source told us.</p>
<p>Huddle was founded in 2006 by led by 32-year-old Andy McLoughlin and Alastair Mitchell.&nbsp;It's raised $14.2 million from <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/matrix-partners" class="hidden_link">Matrix Partners</a> and Eden Ventures.</p>
<p><strong>SEE ALSO: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-32-year-old-entrepreneur-wants-to-reshape-your-workplace-2011-12">Our in-depth look at Huddle with co-founder Andy McLoughlin.</a></strong></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-red-hot-enterprise-startup-brings-in-around-25-million-yearly-and-is-profitable-2012-1#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/this-32-year-old-entrepreneur-wants-to-reshape-your-workplace-2011-12This 32-Year-Old Entrepreneur Is Bent On Beating One Of Microsoft's Largest Businesseshttp://www.businessinsider.com/this-32-year-old-entrepreneur-wants-to-reshape-your-workplace-2011-12
Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:38:00 -0500Matt Lynley
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/4edfd66369bedd241800000d/andy-mcloughlin.jpg" border="0" alt="andy mcloughlin" /></p><p>The term "Enterprise 2.0" is thrown around a lot these days. It refers to a class of companies that are taking ideas from companies like <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/twitter" class="hidden_link">Twitter</a> and <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/facebook" class="hidden_link">Facebook</a> and applying them to workplace software.</p>
<p>It's led to the rise of a whole new batch of startups with red-hot valuations. Jive, an enterprise social network, filed to go public earlier this year and is valued at $573 million, while <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/boxnet" class="hidden_link">Box.net</a> turned down a $500 million buyout offer earlier this year.</p>
<p>Among them is Huddle, a collaboration service led by 32-year-old Andy McLoughlin and Alastair Mitchell. Born in the UK, McLoughlin has since come stateside to build his company with U.S.-based clients.</p>
<p>We sat down with McLoughlin to find out what's happening in this red-hot startup space. Here's some of what we learned:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Enterprise software is a lot more exciting than me-too consumer apps.</strong> "I'd far prefer to make a tool that hundreds of thousands of business use everyday than some me-too photo app that gets good initial traction but people stop using after a week."</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>He thinks <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/microsoft" class="hidden_link">Microsoft</a> SharePoint is ripe for a takedown. </strong>"There's a huge amount of room to improve upon SharePoint as a content collaboration tool the enterprise. It's sold as free software, yet any CIO who has tried (and failed) to implement it knows that it's far too easy to spend many months and hundreds of thousands of dollars getting it ready for deployment. Users generally hate it and most licenses will never be deployed."</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>To sell to the enterprise nowadays, you have to build software that users love. </strong>"It isn't enterprise software, it's software I would like to use and software CIOs would like to buy. They've all been merciless as they look to replace software in the enterprise that isn't working well. You can convince a CIO to buy software in year one, but if the users don't like it, it'll be tough to get them to upgrade in year two."</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>He thinks competitor Box.net is confused. </strong>"Do they want to be an enterprise play or a consumer play like <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/dropbox" class="hidden_link">Dropbox</a>? They are trying to do both, and it's hard to acquire the right kind of customer. We're not gonna have a moment where we are gonna say we aren't an enterprise company any more, we have our sights firmly set on taking SharePoint down."</li>
</ul>
<p>Here's a full transcript:</p>
<p><strong>BUSINESS INSIDER: How did you guys get started?</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong>Andy McLoughlin:</strong>&nbsp;I was working as a consultant. I was a web developer and I was working in-house for a big telco, and I worked with a document workflow management company. They wanted to be able to create a private workspace and invite people in.</p>
<p class="p2">That's really where the idea for Huddle came from, to build a product that would do that but deliver it in the cloud. This was back in 2007, which was before cloud was really talked about. I wanted to build it in a way that a small company all the way to a 50,000 person company could buy and roll out. Build a great product that people love. We don't really focus on the small business, mid-market up to enterprise.</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>BI: Why did you go with an enterprise company, instead of something easy to gain traction &mdash; like photo-sharing app number 47?&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong>AM</strong>: My background is in business software and both Alastair (co-founder) and I are passionate about making software that people love serves a real business need. The day of stuffy, boring enterprise software has passed &mdash; these days business tools should be as intuitive, sexy and fun as the apps we use in our personal lives.&nbsp;I'd far prefer to make a tool that hundreds of thousands of business use everyday than some me-too photo app that gets good initial traction but people stop using after a week.</p>
<p><img class="float_left" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/4edfd7a5ecad04b142000008/huddle-pullquote.jpg" border="0" alt="huddle pullquote" /></p>
<p class="p2"><strong>BI: Do you think it's harder to run an enterprise startup than a consumer focused startup?</strong></p>
<p class="p2"><strong>AM</strong>:&nbsp;Running a start-up regardless of what it does is hard, full stop. However, building a start-up that sells to the enterprise is a longer, more expensive game. For example, most start-ups don't want to have to deal with employing and managing a sales teams. They'd prefer to build a light-touch business that only transacts online. This certainly takes different skills to managing a team made up exclusively of developers and designers.</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>BI: So what do you think of this whole notion of "enterprise 2.0?"</strong>&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>AM</strong>: We've been talking about his for two or three years. For us, enterprise 2.0 is a great buzzword but it embodies three things. It's about making enterprise software usable, software they enjoy using as much as they enjoy tools they use in their personal lives. Huddle, though there's not a one-to-one comparison, it's giving people the usability that they would expect from a consumer tool.</p>
<p class="p2">Then there's the social element, social really means putting people at the center of what's going on. Enterprise has to be social now. And it's really about access &mdash;&nbsp;traditional enterprise systems were only accessible at the computer at a desk. Enterprise 2.0 is all about access from wherever we are. You might use Huddle on the web, from email, anything else. You have to have clients for <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/iphone" class="hidden_link">iPhone</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/blackberry" class="hidden_link">BlackBerry</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/ipad" class="hidden_link">iPad</a>.</p>
<p class="p2">You have to think about what people need to do on the go. They have to get access to the right content at the right time quickly. They have to be able to create and mock up tasks on the go, find the right files quickly. You have to think hard about what people are looking for.</p>
<p class="p1"><strong><img style="float:right;" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/4deff250ccd1d5c513270000/hp-servers-in-apple-data-center.jpg" border="0" alt="HP servers in Apple data center" />BI: How do you guys stack up against some of the other enterprise startups out there?</strong></p>
<p class="p2"><strong>AM</strong>: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/yammer" class="hidden_link">Yammer</a> is talking about doing work and Huddle is about doing it. That's where I see them. In terms of Box, that's a slightly closer deal. Box is primarily files and a bit of content, they are file storage in the cloud. Huddle is content collaboration &mdash; it isn't just filespace, it's the other tools that help you work on those files.</p>
<p class="p2">Box has evolved from a personal storage tool to sharing. Huddle, the DNA of building a tool for business has been there since day one. We have this idea of the workspace model. Enterprises can quickly spin up work spaces, it's not a place I would store my own personal files.</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>BI: Why do you think Microsoft needs to be taken down? What's bad about SharePoint?</strong></p>
<p class="p2"><strong>AM</strong>:&nbsp;I don't think that Microsoft in its entirety needs to be taken down. Personally, I'm a fan of the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/xbox" class="hidden_link">Xbox</a>, and we have tons of customers who rely on <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/windows" class="hidden_link">Windows</a> and Office. But there's a huge amount of room to improve upon SharePoint as a content collaboration tool the enterprise. It's sold as free software, yet any CIO who has tried (and failed) to implement it knows that it's far too easy to spend many months and hundreds of thousands of dollars getting it ready for deployment. Users generally hate it and most licenses will never be deployed.</p>
<p class="p2"><strong>BI: So, how big are you guys now? How fast are you growing?</strong></p>
<p class="p2"><strong>AM</strong>: Right now we have about 100,000 business across 180 countries as customers. Huddle is available in 15 languages. We have more than 75 percent of the Fortune 500 using Huddle as well. This was a market we initially knew nothing about, but we've really become experts.&nbsp;More than 70 percent of the central UK governments use Huddle.</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>BI: They trust you with your data, even though it's stored on remote servers?</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><strong>AM</strong>: Yes. The way we approached government, we started small &mdash;&nbsp;small deployments inside teams and departments.&nbsp;We have a lot of government who use the public cloud, and we've been accredited by the government for information that's up to, but not including, restricted information.</p>
<p class="p2"><strong>BI: Why did you start an office in San Francisco?</strong></p>
<p class="p2"><strong>AM</strong>: In Q2 2010, we raised a round led by <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/matrix-partners" class="hidden_link">Matrix Partners</a>, a U.S. venture capital firm. We always had our eyes on the US, it's a billion dollar plus global business. The U.S. was our second biggest market, now it's on par with the numbers we sell in the U.K. If we were going to be able to close big deals, we had to have a presence here. It's safe to say the west coast is still the beating heart of technology.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">The office has been a pretty constant size for the last six months. We don't have any engineering in the US, it's primarily sales and marketing. This will stay a commercial office. We're also gonna be opening up on the east coast next year as well.</p>
<p class="p2"><strong>BI: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/where" class="hidden_link">Where</a> are you guys headed next year?</strong></p>
<p class="p2"><strong>AM</strong>: Next year, the focus for us is continuing to do more in the enterprise. Over the last 3 years we've been growing from a provider of tools for SMBs to a provider of tools for the enterprise. We're working with great organizations with lots of users. The software we're building is allowing them to do their work better.</p>
<p class="p2">Making sure the mobile apps are as great as possible, the web UI, we're improving that. We're thinking about how people are using Huddle &mdash;&nbsp;doing a lot of work to make sure the system is at your fingertips really wherever you are. My dream would be that Huddle is almost invisible, it's like collaborative glue that underpins all the work that you do in your business.</p>
<p class="p2"><strong>BI: What is it you and the other successful enterprise startups think you are doing right? Why is your model working?</strong></p>
<p class="p2"><strong>AM</strong>: All of the companies, the one thing all of them have done is creating a great brand. It isn't enterprise software, it's software I would like to use and software CIOs would like to buy. They've all been merciless as they look to replace software in the enterprise that isn't working well. You can convince a CIO to buy software in year one, but if the users don't like it, it'll be tough to get them to upgrade in year two.</p>
<p class="p1"><strong>BI: You guys are growing a little more conservatively, compared to Box.net, which is basically raising a ton of money and growing as fast as it can. Which method works?</strong></p>
<p class="p2"><strong>AM</strong>: The issue with Box.net is that they are confused about what they want to be. Do they want to be an enterprise play or a consumer play like Dropbox? They are trying to do both, and it's hard to acquire the right kind of customer. We're not gonna have a moment where we are gonna say we aren't an enterprise company any more, we have our sights firmly set on taking SharePoint down.</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-32-year-old-entrepreneur-wants-to-reshape-your-workplace-2011-12#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p>